Amy Jo Burns and I wrote the below interview via email in the summer of 2023, shortly after I finished reading an Advanced Reader Copy of her beautiful novel, Mercury, which was published by Celadon Books on January 2, 2024. Mercury is one of PEOPLE's Best New Books To Read in January 2024 and is Barnes & Noble’s January 2024 Book Club pick.
Matthew Quick: Okay. Let’s get right to it. I LOVED LOVED LOVED Mercury for so many reasons. It’s got a smart page-turning plot that loops back on itself in surprising ways, and yet—at the same time—it’s a rich psychological study of multiple characters, all of whom are warmly drawn. They feel remarkably authentic and you treat them each so well, even when you are exposing their worst personality traits. Mercury is beautifully written. The last sentence of the book crushed me. It elevates love and forgiveness. It’s set in the nineties, a time I miss more and more the further we descend into the age of the smart phone. It focuses on a family that happens to own a roofing business, but the novel isn’t really about roofing. It’s about how blood bonds somehow save, even as they test the limits of our sanity. The male and female characters are equally strong. It’s refreshingly life-affirming and I finished it with tears streaming down my face. I couldn’t wait to put it in the hands of friends and family members. And I know everyone here at There Will Be Mistakes is going to love this one as much as I did.
Amy Jo Burns: This means the world to me. I really loved writing this book—it came as such a surprise and was such a joy to work on. As you know, writing a book is hard, and this story came around just when I needed it.
MQ: I’ve written some about the conscious vs subconscious reasons we novelists choose subjects. What was your conscious reason for writing Mercury? And looking back now with the book completed, what would you say you learned through the writing of this novel? Was there something previously unconscious that emerged? Maybe even snuck into the writing? Were you surprised by anything during the writing process? Have you been surprised as you revisit the story?
AJB: This whole novel actually began as the result of a failed essay. I was trying to write about my grandfather, and what it’s like to be named after someone you have a particularly difficult relationship with. His name was Joseph, and my middle name “Jo” comes from him. When I was born, there were no other boys in the family to carry on that name, so I got named after him. After that, three more boys were born into the Burns family, but I’m still the only Joseph “namesake.”
The problem I was having was that I couldn’t locate any compassion for my grandfather. He was tough, and said mean things, and often took advantage of his children. When my grandmother died in 2017, I was seven months pregnant with my daughter. At the memorial, I was eating a cookie, and my grandfather came up to me and said, “Someone take the cookies away from her!”
The veil of my patience was so thin at that moment that I snapped and said, “Stop it. You can’t talk to me like that anymore.” And then for a long time I wondered if I should have tried harder to be both honest and gracious toward someone who had just lost his wife. When he died at age 99 of covid in the fall of 2020, those became the last words I said to him. It troubled me then, and it still does.
So I began writing a novel with a side character named Mick (who is loosely based on my grandpa) with the hope of redeeming some of what was lost. I wanted to write about a family that chooses to stay together, even if it means first falling apart. I wanted to imagine a family that learns to fight together in the right way. What surprised me was how I started writing a book about something very sad, but then the book itself ended up pulsing with a very authentic kind of joy. And now that I think about it, this story was so much about how characters wrestle with how to forgive each other that it gave me so much compassion for my grandfather and the life he led. It also helped me find compassion for myself, too.
MQ: As you know, this Substack account is called There Will Be Mistakes. Did you make any interesting and/or important mistakes while writing Mercury? If so, how did you cope? And what did you learn?
AJB: Oof, it’s all mistakes, isn’t it?
I was feeling really lost when I started writing this book. In fact, I didn’t even know I was writing it. I’d just spent almost three years on a different project that I just couldn’t get to come together, and I couldn’t understand why. So I told myself I needed to start again with something else. The problem was, I just didn’t have the heart or the bravery for it. I really felt like a failure.
In August of 2021, I didn’t have much time to write. My two wonderful kids were home for the summer, and on a Saturday my husband took them to the park for the afternoon. I told myself I just had to write one page—that was it. Something small, just to remind myself that I could. Something with no strings attached.
I’d had this memory nagging at me of being at the ballpark in my small hometown as a kid, and seeing a man smoking a cigarette behind the bleachers during a little league game. He was a friend of my parents, and he asked my mother not to tell his wife that he was smoking. I remember wondering why he wouldn’t want his wife to know, and of course as an adult I realized there could be any number of reasons. So I decided to imagine what one of those reasons might be.
But what I quickly discovered as I was writing, and what I think was subconscious until then, was that I wanted to write about a family a little like mine—a family of roofers with a lot of love and secrets between them.
I remember thinking that no one would want to read a book like that. But I’d just spent the better part of three years writing the kind of book I thought readers would want, and that’s where I went astray. I’d gone looking outside myself for material, rather than digging into my own history, or my own way of seeing the world—which is how I produce my best work.
What surprised me was how immediately these characters came to life and begged to be written about. They showed me how important, and how funny, and engaging, and complex lives like theirs can be. And after that, I couldn’t look away. I wrote furiously through the end of the year, and into the next. It was the quickest I’ve ever written anything in my life.
MQ: In some ways, Mercury is about the fall of matriarch, Elise, and the rise of her unlikely successor, Marley. They’re both forced to play what some might consider traditionally feminine roles—birthing children, making dinners, caring for the kids, taking care of their husbands’ egos—and yet neither one is anything even close to a submissive wife. They defy gender norms, even as they fight to keep the Joseph family together. I found Elise and Marley—and especially the tension between them—to be electric and tragic and transcendent all at once. They both feel trapped by circumstances, but they also never fully accept the limits of their cages. Behind the scenes, they pull all the strings, but with love and a sense of honor and duty. Why did you choose to write about trapped strong women taking care of damaged men?
AJB: I really wanted to write about the kind of “blue collar” women I know because they defy every single title placed on them. They aren’t clones of Rosie the Riveter; they’re entrepreneurs and business experts in their own right, often running the administrative end of their husbands’ businesses without paychecks or titles of their own. They usually also raise their children with the full assumed responsibility of childcare, and they rarely say no to any of it. I wanted to show the cascading cost of this lack of choice throughout a generation, and also celebrate how a woman finds her way, even still.
But it was equally important to me that the men in the novel not be treated as villains—or heroes, either. Patriarchy ultimately serves no one, in my opinion. The brothers in the Joseph family are desperate to avoid becoming anything like their father, but they’re left to figure out on their own what they might be instead. In a lot of ways, they are also trapped by these ideas of patriarchy, and I wanted to celebrate their finding freedom from it on the other side, too.
MQ: One of the things this former roofer particularly appreciated about Mercury is your treatment of working-class male characters. You seem to know their psychology quite well. And even when you are showing them at their worst, it feels like you still genuinely love these people. In your acknowledgments, you write, “I’m the daughter, granddaughter, niece, and sister of some phenomenal roofers.” Why did you choose to write about roofers? Was it difficult? And how have the roofers in your life responded to the book?
AJB: I wanted to write about roofers because they are absolutely incredible storytellers. No one can tell a joke like they can. My brother is probably the funniest person I know, and my cousin recently told me his favorite thing to do is drive around with his dad (also a roofer), and watch him point to a random building and say, “Let me tell you everything that went wrong on that roof.” I would say I learned how to tell stories from them.
I decided early on to tell this story, at least in part, just as they would—and it has been one of the most joyful experiences of my writing life.
The roofers I know are extremely excited to read the book. I hope I make them proud!
MQ: I found the psychological interplay between Baylor, Waylon, and Shay to be spot on. How do you know so much about the inner lives of brothers?
AJB: Both of my parents come from big families, mostly with brothers. That gave me a lot of opportunities to watch how childhood fights and misunderstandings age into adulthood—how there’s so much tenderness and intimacy there, but also so much hurt that can keep siblings apart.
My dad once told me that he and his brothers built the house they lived in when they were teenagers, along with their father. He also said there was a cow already living in the set foundation of the house when they arrived. That always felt to me like it belonged in a book, and so I wrote it into the story of the Joseph family.
MQ: Did you ever consider telling this one exclusively from Marley’s point of view? I think the third-person multiple-perspective POV was masterfully done. You definitely made the right choice. Why did you decide to deploy it? Were there false starts that were different? How did the POV of this book come to be?
AJB: From the beginning, I saw this as a multi-voiced book. (Though with my previous novel, Shiner, it was more of a process. I started with one voice and gradually added in two more.) I really wanted Mercury to examine a very complex family situation, and in order to do it justice, I felt that the characters each needed to own a piece of the truth, and also the solution. I wanted them to disagree about what went wrong, and who was at fault. I think that’s how we try to arrive at some semblance of the truth—by getting mixed perspectives and letting them commingle.
At first I thought this story would be told only through Marley and Waylon’s eyes, but I quickly realized that in order to capture what it really means to be a brother, I had to let all of them speak. I pictured each of them pulling up a chair to the table and saying, “Let me tell you what really happened.” Getting to write so many characters was one of my favorite things about this project.
MQ: I sort of felt like Marley was the main character. Was she? Do you relate to her most?
AJB: I do think Marley is the main character, and I gave her all the qualities I love about my best friends from home, traits I’d like more of in myself. She shows up immediately for the people in her life. She’s not afraid to try new things or wade into someone else’s mess. She’s also very good at being honest in a really loving way. I wrote Marley’s character to show myself how I’d like to try to be, and what my oldest friends inspire me to become.
MQ: About halfway into the novel, you write, “She had split into two Marleys—one who loved the Josephs, and one who loved herself.” I’ve thought a lot about how I’ve split in my personal life, trying to take care of others and myself simultaneously. I’ve done a lot of analysis these past few years. LOL. Would you say the book is in some ways about Marley’s need to become whole again? Have you ever felt that need?
AJB: I have felt this so often in my life that I’ve lost count! What I love about Marley is that she remains committed to showing up for both parts of her divided self, even if she isn’t quite sure how to “merge” them. I love that she often says, “I don’t know how to do this.” And I think that honesty ends up being her guide toward a more whole version of herself. I’ve felt this divide most often when I consider my “depressed” self, and my “regular” self. For most of my life I thought my depressed self ought to be suppressed, in favor of letting my “regular self” live unencumbered. I never considered that they might be the same person, and my “depressed self” deserved to be listened to and considered.
That was a huge turning point when I stopped trying to eradicate my sadder moments and started listening to what they might be trying to teach me instead.
MQ: I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Marley does a little roofing in the book. You ever step out onto a roof with tools in hand?
AJB: Oh my gosh. I went up only once when I was in college, when my younger brother wanted to show me the roof he was working on. It was a low building, and I got so dizzy at the top that I had to sit down. It was embarrassing and hilarious. One time I got dizzy just standing on the kitchen counter to get something off a high shelf, and my dad said, “How are you my daughter?”
Waylon, the middle child in the Joseph family, also has a fear of heights. I gave that trait to him because that is me, all the way. I’ve answered the phone at the business office and been in the warehouse and handled tubes of rubber—but I will always prefer to keep both of my feet on the ground.
MQ: Marley’s mother tells her she wouldn’t wish her an easy life, but a full one. Shay keeps a “short list … tucked behind the driver’s license in his wallet.” It says three things: “1. A whole person loves well. 2. They keep their promises. 3. They tell the truth.” It seems as though all of your characters—in one way or another—are trying to live full lives and be whole. But it’s, of course, difficult. Do you struggle with this in your life? And if so, do you have a personal strategy you might like to share?
AJB: When I write my characters, I can’t really see it at the time, but I always end up seeing something in them that I’m desperate for in myself. I like to give them my own shortcomings as well as my aspirations.
Shay and I are very alike in that we both feel like we’ve been missing “something” since birth, but we can’t quite name or find what that “something” is. What I find so inspiring about Shay is that he has so much bravery about naming it. About trying to find peace and with this never-being-enoughness. He feels a little broken, and there’s something so beautiful about that.
In terms of a personal strategy that’s come to be useful to me, now that I think of it, that ended up in the book, too. There’s a line of dialogue Marley’s mother Ruth always says to her, both as a reminder and as an encouragement: “Head on straight, heart on straight.”
That phrase comes right out of my own life. Often as a result of the books I’ve written, I end up talking about painful things from my own past. I feel very lucky that I get to share that intimate space with readers and talk to them about hard truths. But I was noticing—with my first book in particular, a memoir titled Cinderland—that every time I would talk about hard things, I’d be overcome with either anxiety or fear. What if I didn’t represent myself or my writing well? What if I said something I wished I hadn’t? What if this all led to more hurt for me or for someone one else?
It’s a rabbit hole I can go down all too easily. So I created a shorthand phrase that I’d repeat to myself any time I had to talk about the book—or even any time I was doing something in life that made me uneasy, whether it was going for a follow-up doctor’s appointment or even trying to teach my kids how to swim.
Head on straight, heart on straight.
We’ve all heard the first part of that phrase many times, and it serves us well. When I speak, I want to make sense, put things in order. But perhaps more importantly, I want my heart to show up in those moments. I want to be true, be present, be real with whoever is in front of me. My own anxiety or depression can send me to far off places and rob me of the gifts found in the now. So that phrase is something I repeat to myself when I can feel those scary feelings at the edges of my mind or heart. It just reminds me that joy can often be found in paying attention to what’s right in front of you.
MQ: The patriarch of the family, Mick, is a complicated and often frustrating man. We learn toward the end of the book why he is the way he is. I found those parts moving. He’s a man today’s society might discard. But your characters don’t.
AJB: One of the goals I had in this book is that no character gets written off—no one. Even the ones we might really dislike. I wanted everyone to get a second chance, and whether they take it is up to them.
One of the reasons family can be so maddening is that there is so much love and gratitude tied up with all the frustration and hurt. It was important to me from the beginning that I write about a family that chooses to stay together, and over time they learn that the value in that will always surpass what a lucrative business might promise.
I usually find that when I feel that urge to write someone off, if I spend time hearing a bit of their story, I start to understand them in a new way. Listening to someone’s story brings about such great compassion, and I wanted to model that in the Joseph family.
MQ: In the Acknowledgments, you credit your father with providing “just the spark” when he drew a map for you of a church steeple. Without spoilers, of course, I’d love to hear that story. What is your relationship with your father like?
AJB: My dad has the best stories about going up on the roof. I NEVER get tired of them. My favorite stories are about all the things that went wrong—a major leak right into the cereal aisle of a grocery store, hitting his head on the ringer in a bell tower, losing his balance and his cell phone falling into a river. He is self-taught in every single way, someone who wanted to be good at his craft and just learned how to do it. I find that so inspiring. He is one of the most hard-working, dedicated people I’ve ever met. We often think of those who serve the “city” as civil servants, or nurses, or teachers, as well we should. But there’s also something to be said for those who care for the structure of the city itself—construction workers, plumbers, electricians, and roofers.
My father’s life’s work is caring for Pittsburgh’s industrial skyline. It’s his artistry and his expertise. And he created a place for other roofers to learn how to do it, too. He always felt it was important to be able to provide a good job for anyone who was looking for a fresh start in life. It took everything he had to build something from the ground up, and yet he was also the person who drove me to my ballet classes very early every Saturday morning.
One of my favorite stories that he told me was about going up into the attic space of the church we attended when I was young. He talked about bats flying in his face, the spindly beams he had to travel to get to the ladder to the bell tower, and how hard it was to pop the scuttle off the top to reach the roof. I thought it was so amazing to see a building we were all so familiar with in just this way—looking at its innards, and then getting to see our town from such a great height.
When I told him I was writing a book about roofers that found a body in an attic, he got the biggest kick out of it. I’ve always loved his drawings—and he got a pen and drew a picture of what the steeple looked like, and where a body might be found hiding in a church attic. “There could be a hand sticking out!” he said. Writing is often so solitary, and it felt really special to share this pivotal part of the book with my dad, who inspired the book in so many ways.
MQ: Some of the characters in Mercury—particularly Marley and Shay—talk a lot about escaping.
A much younger me once worked with roofers who called me “College,” because I was attending classes at La Salle University when I wasn’t on the hot summer roofs.
These roofers made me do the worst jobs—like manning the kettle and using rope to pull up boiling buckets of tar onto the high roofs and with no safety gear at all. The men cursed at me regularly and never worried about my feelings, but on break they’d often treat me to cherry hamantaschen and coffee from the local bakery. And they’d tell me about their wives and kids and financial troubles. Sometimes they’d talk wistfully about trips abroad they took long ago in their youth. Most had given up on some itchy dream their soul would forever want to scratch. In many ways, as our bodies baked together in the searing sun, they’d slowly harden into rough surrogate fathers.
But at the end of every summer, without fail, they decathected from me, once again becoming distant and cold. Each year on my last day, just before I left them to go back to school, one-by-one they’d all say, “Don’t come back, College. We don’t ever want to see you again.” When I’d return the next summer, they’d shake their heads and say, “You need more punishment, College? You haven’t learned yet?”
After spending five summers with these men, I came to understand that this was their way of caring about me. It was code for “get yourself out of this life and do something—anything—better.” And I’ve seldom experienced that kind of professional selflessness since—the exact opposite of pulling people down as they try to climb up. It was a hard working-man type of cheerleading. And I loved those men for wishing their summertime laborer a better life than they had for themselves.
With the exception of Mick, your characters—particularly Baylor—seem to have that sort of hard-nosed selflessness. Did you experience this type of gruff working-class altruism? Did that inspire the writing at all?
AJB: You have described what is absolutely the beating heart and biggest inspiration of this novel. I have never known anyone so quietly generous as the men who worked on the roof with my father’s company. One of them, my father’s best friend, read and helped me edit all of my college entrance essays. Another gave me a hundred dollars when I graduated high school—money he didn’t have to spare. Yet another attended one of my school talent shows and loudly cheered for me right in the front row. Their actions speak so clearly when their mouths can’t find the words. Their hearts show it, though, and that’s exactly what I wanted to capture in the book.
MQ: What was your greatest challenge while writing this book?
AJB: Probably my own self-doubt. I really wrestled with whether I’d ever get to publish another book again, mostly for reasons that were pandemic-related (lack of reliable childcare, bookstores and publishers shuttering, the list goes on). After the difficulties of the last few years—which we all have shared—I really needed to be reminded what was worth fighting for. These characters reminded me, and they brought me back to life and then some.
MQ: What was your greatest joy?
AJB: I loved writing all the characters in this book, but if I had to choose my greatest joy, it would have to be writing Baylor’s character, hands down. Everyone I know has, or had, a Baylor in their lives. Someone whose heart is so tenderly tucked deep inside a very tough exterior, someone who says the wrong things at the wrong time, and someone you hope will grow up just enough to be a good spouse, a good friend, a good uncle, a good brother—and sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t. I loved creating a character arc for Baylor that didn’t excuse his faults, but instead showed how someone like him can face them head-on and decide to be better. He was fun, and funny, and he feels like someone who would fit right in with my family.
MQ: Many people who read There Will Be Mistakes are aspiring writers. Do you have any inspiration for them? Maybe a bit of advice and/or a writing-life story to keep them moving forward?
AJB: What I find most comforting in this writing life is that talent rarely has much to do with it, but work ethic does. Writing and publishing a book is a mix of both patience and hustle, which is exactly what diligence is. The good news: this is work we can do while we’re shaking in our boots, and we can complete an entire project even when we’re not sure we’ll ever reach the finish line.
The courage you need will come as you go.
MQ: Just in case I didn’t make this clear enough at the start of this interview, I think everyone should immediately buy a copy of Mercury from their local indie bookshop. I very rarely connect as strongly as I did with your latest. I finished reading with the sense that my soul had been well cared for. But why do you think the readers here at There Will Be Mistakes should pick up Mercury? What do you hope they’ll take from it?
AJB: I hope your readers pick up Mercury because it has everything I love in a big-hearted, juicy family drama: that “what happened here” vibe, multiple voices with their own secrets to tell, and characters who are committed to learning how to show up for one another—even when they learn it the hard way.
I also hope the book inspires readers to ask whether it’s possible to save someone you love and what it really means to belong somewhere or to someone. In part, Mercury is about the cost of silence throughout generations and the redemptive power of claiming home for oneself, so when readers turn the final page, I hope they take some of that power with them, too.
MQ: Okay, Amy Jo. Thanks so much for being here with us today. Thanks for writing a gorgeous life-affirming book. Thanks for making me cry in the best of ways. I’ll be wishing you every possible success with Mercury.
AJB: Thank you so much, Matthew. This has been such a joy and a gift in every way. I’m so grateful for your support and for the chance to connect with everyone who reads There Will Be Mistakes!
Buy Mercury. (Seriously. Buy it right now. You will love it.)
Learn more about Amy Jo Burns.
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Such meaningful, insightful questions, Matthew. I especially connected with Amy's responses about claiming a home for oneself and listening to the sadder moments in ones life, those hanging into the edges that prevent moving forward. Thanks for sharing this interview! Ordering the book now.
There are several quotes in this interview that could be made into posters. Such inspiring words. Amy Jo seems born to have written this novel. Her deep, sincere responses were fantastic. I'll need to pick up that book!